Our taxi driver was already waiting for us when I came downstairs at 3:20 am and within half an hour, Bill and I were at the Prague Airport with hundreds of other people. Our flight to Amsterdam left on time, but midway through the flight, the crew moved us to the first class seats because of our very tight connection to Bordeaux. It was VERY far from our arrival in the D terminal to our destination in the C terminal. In fact, it was nearly a mile!

We made our flight with only about five minutes to spare—and so did our luggage. (Whew!) Since we couldn’t check into our hotel until 4 pm and it was now about 11:30 am, we decided to tour the Cathédral Saint André in Bordeaux. My husband Carl and I tried to visit when we were here in 2010, but it was Bastille Day and everything was closed, even the Cathedral. When Bill and I walked in, we heard the organist and a trumpeter rehearsing.

I was most nervous about driving a strange car in a foreign country — in fact this is my first time. At least, drivers drive on the right side of the road! There were so many roundabouts we had to traverse, maybe at least a dozen. I’m happy to say that we arrived at our hotel in Saintes safely, although I missed a few turns and our car’s GPS had to recalculate. It took us about an hour and a half to reach Saintes, about 120 kilometres from Bordeaux.

The whole reason that we are here in Saintes is because of the early music festival here which has taken place yearly for the last forty years. My husband Carl and I attended it, and found it to be of extremely high quality. I persuaded Bill Potter that this would be a worthy venture and so here we are.

We had two concerts tonight, the first was at the Cathédrale Saint Pierre with a fantastic early music group called Il Caravaggio, directed by Camille Delaforge. There were a few singers plus instrumentalists and they performed music of Purcell, Ferandini, and Charpentier. All the soloists were good but the mezzo-soprano, Floriane Hasler, was especially outstanding, and there were many gorgeous, sublime moments. The cathedral was packed with perhaps 500 people or more, and I marveled that all these people were hear to listen to early music.

Our second concert started a little after 9 pm in the Abbaye aux Dames, a medieval monastery, and was performed by an international group of students led by Amandine Beyer from the Académie d’Ambronay. They played EIGHT concertos by Evaristo Felice Dall’Abaco, Antonio Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, and Johann Adolph Hasse, in music featuring violin, bassoon, or cello soloists, each one a virtuoso. I was thinking it was a little like eating eight chocolate cakes in one sitting, a metaphor my husband Carl used to use—so rich! The concert was only supposed to last an hour and fifteen minutes without an intermission, but we didn’t leave the Abbaye until after 11 pm.

At both concerts, the crowd urged the performers to play TWO encores after the published program, and here in Europe they do not use standing ovations to express their satisfaction — they start clapping in rhythmic unison, getting louder and louder. It’s all very exciting.

It’s been a super-long day, having been awake since 3 am, so as soon as we returned to the hotel, I was in bed. We’ll be here until Saturday.